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The History of Australian Feminism: Getting Equal
By Marilyn Lake
Allen & Unwin
$29.95
Review by Rachel Evans
In her introduction, Marilyn Lake states that the aim of The History of Australian Feminism: Getting Equal is to correct common misconceptions, the two most notable being that there have been only two "waves" of feminism with long lulls between and that Australian feminists have been concerned only with advancing the interests of white, middle-class career women.
Lake documents that it was married women who provided the spark for the suffragist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While no women enjoyed political rights, married women were also denied the right to their children, property and bodies. Winning the vote was seen as the first step towards asserting women's right to equality.
Lake describes the predominant ideas of the suffragists as attempting to "make men more like women". They campaigned to ban alcohol, gambling and sexually overt material. Feminists of the time promoted women as asexual, virtuous creatures.
Men were encouraged to practice sexual abstinence and stop drinking and gambling. When feminist Brettena Smythe campaigned for contraceptives, she was frowned upon by most feminists, who saw sexual relations as the root of women's degradation.
Suffrage
The English suffragist movement undertook mass actions and was met with state repression. Police violence at rallies, arrests and the forced feeding of hunger striking suffragists won the movement international attention.
Lake's book gives little impression that this level of radical activity took place within the Australian movement. Petitioning, lobbying establishment figures and educating women are painted as the movement's main activities.
Nonetheless the movement radicalised many women and was effective in winning women's voting rights. South Australia was the first state to give women the vote in 1894; Victoria was the last in 1908.
Having won the vote, many post-suffrage feminists aligned themselves with the conservative temperance movement. A 1919 rally organised by Women's Christian Temperance Union to demand "No License" (for liquor) was one of the largest women's rallies seen to that point.
Contrary to popular belief, women did not leave the political scene after winning the vote. Lake documents how women continued to organise for equal pay, better child care, maternity rights, for harsher penalties for child molestation, for an increase in the number of women in state employment and for temperance.
The Labor Party wooed the women's vote by introducing the maternity allowance. The first world war brought many women's organisations into anti-conscription and pacifist activity.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the discussion of women's economic independence began to displace the focus on temperance. Equal pay and child and motherhood endowment payments were demanded. Socialist women led the charge for equal pay, arguing against the claims of many male-dominated trade unions that "women are taking men's jobs".
Mothers' rights
The campaign for motherhood endowment payments was so strong that a royal commission was held. The commission found that paying women independently of their husbands would "introduce a powerful solvent into family life as we know it". It was never introduced.
The History of Australian Feminism: Getting Equal devotes considerable space to recording feminist campaigns for Aboriginal rights, particularly against the state taking children from working-class and Aboriginal mothers under charges of "neglect".
In the 1880s, some feminists had championed the cause of "neglected" children and had supported the introduction of "protection acts", which allowed the state to take Aboriginal and other working-class children from their mothers.
While Aboriginal mothers' rights were only taken up by a small section of the movement, the issue of equal guardianship rights for working mothers galvanised the entire movement. Massive mobilisations saw the state introduce equal custody rights for white women, but with conditions.
Lake records how in the 1930s there was increased involvement of leading feminists in demands for Aboriginal women's rights. Pamphlets and meetings highlighted the black slave trade. Aboriginal men and women were rarely paid wages for work, women were regularly raped by white men, and children were stolen from Aboriginal families. The movement demanded land, education and equal pay for Aboriginal women and their families.
Inheriting "protection" politics from the temperance philosophy, the movement also demanded women medical officers to protect Aboriginal women from white men.
Tireless campaigning nationally and internationally forced the Western Australian government to hold a royal commission into charges that settlers were rapists and were stealing land from the rightful Aboriginal owners. The WA government was forced to impose tougher penalties on white male rapists. More left-wing feminists began to go beyond talk about "protection" to demand "equality".
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POst-war feminism
During the second world war, women's mass entry into the job market demonstrated the benefits of economic independence for women. Consequently, the 1940s saw a push for women's right to work and equal pay.
Issues of women's sexuality also developed a high profile in this period, with the opening of birth control centres. Feminists who continued to advocate abstinence had now become relatively isolated.
The 1950s brought a backlash, as an anti-communist government denounced feminism as subversive and anti-family.
Lake notes how the resurgence of the women's movement in the 1960s — the second wave — arose alongside the youth radicalisation in opposition to the Vietnam War. Women within the anti-war and student movements discovered that "we need our own movement for independence".
"Conciousness raising" and challenging social conditioning formed important parts of the movement. The movement formed campaign collectives and fought for equal pay, child-care and the right of women to control their bodies.
Conferences like the 1974 Socialist and Feminist Conference, which attracted 600 women, debated whether men or capitalism caused women's oppression.
The movement coalesced into two major organisations: the Women's Electoral Lobby and Women's Liberation. The more conservative Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) advocated an approach based on lobbying politicians, petitioning and policy drafting. Many of its members became involved in the Labor Party. Women's Liberation advocated a more radical, grass-roots approach.
However, for the most part, these political differences did not prevent unified campaigns.
The movement forced government to enact no-fault divorce, the criminalisation of rape in marriage, the introduction of intervention orders, formal equal pay and a dramatic funding increase to women's services such as child care centres, rape crisis centres and emergency housing.
While The History of Australian Feminism: Getting Equal contains many interesting facts about feminists in the past century, Lake refuses to analyse how the movement won concessions.
Lake criticises the "femocratisation" of the movement but spends more space positively assessing WEL's policy-drafting skills than documenting the mass character of the movement's campaigns. Consequently, the reader ends up with the idea that if policy-drafting is "professional" enough the government might act on it, rather than the correct conclusion that it was the mass actions of the feminist movement that forced governments to act.